Joan Didion - Play It as It Lays

"Straighten your shoulders," Helene said,]if ting her drink slightly as Maria sat down. "You look spectral. We should go to the Springs together." Helene's eyes were not on Maria but on two women who sat across the room. "Allene Walsh has a new friend ," she murmured to Maria as she smiled at the older of the two women.

"They've been spooning food into each other's mouths for the past half hour."

“She's an actress named Sharon Carroll, I worked with her once."

Maria tried to summon up some other detail to assuage Helene's avid interest in other people. "She kept a dildo in her dressing room."

"Allene Walsh has more dildoes around her house than anybody I ever knew. Look at my new ring."

"I saw it."

"From Carlotta." Helene studied the emerald. "For staying on the desert. Speaking of new friends . I mean he was shuttling them in and out of that motel like the dailies, I couldn't even get up for a Nembutal without knocking over somebody's bottle of Monsieur Y ."

For an instant Helene's face seemed to lose its animation, and when she spoke again her voice was flat and preoccupied. "You look like hell, Maria, this isn't any excuse for you to f all apart, I mean a divorce. I've done it twice."

"I thought only once."

"Twice," Helene said without interest. "BZ says once because that's what he told his mother." She was intent upon her reflection in the mirror behind the table, tracing a line with one finger from her chin to her temple. "You can really tell," she said finally.

"Tell what?"

"Tell I haven't done my Laszlo in three days." Helene's voice was still flat but her interest seemed revived.

At two o'clock they met Carter and the lawyers outside the courtroom in Santa Monica, and at two-thirty Maria swore and Helene confirmed that the defendant, Carter Lang, had repeatedly struck and in other ways humiliated the plaintiff, Mrs. Maria Lang.

The charge was mental cruelty, uncontested. This Mrs. Maria Lang to whom the lawyers referred seemed to Maria someone other than herself, an aggrieved wife she might see interviewed on television.

As they waited for the details to be cleared up, the papers to be signed, Maria sat very still with her hands in her lap. Helene stirred restlessly beside her, her eyes across the aisle, on Carter and his lawyer. " Carter," Helene whispered finally, leaning across Maria to attract his attention. " Puzzle of the week. Guess which two dykes were seen feeding each other cheese soufflé in the Bistro today."

"WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING," Carter said the next time she saw him.

"Working. I'm going to be working very soon."

"I mean who've you been seeing."

“Nobody. Helene. BZ. BZ comes by sometimes."

"Don't get into that," Carter said.

"He's your friend," Maria said.

THE FIRST TIME Maria ever met BZ it had been at the beach house and it had been two o'clock on a weekday afternoon and it was the sumner Carter was cutting Angel Beach.

"I've got a meeting at the beach with this guy from San Francisco I told you about," Carter had said. "You come along and swim."

"I don't feel like swimming."

"Maria," Carter had said finally, 'he's going to maybe put up some money. Maybe. All right?"

When they walked into the beach house she thought there must have been some misunderstanding, some mixup of time or day, because the man to whom Carter spoke was sitting alone with a projector in the darkened living room running a blue movie of extraordinary technical quality.

"Stroke of two, very prompt," the man had said, and looked at Maria for a long while before he turned off the projector.

"Did you get by the studio yesterday?" Carter seemed oblivious to the meeting's peculiar circumstance. "They show you the rough cut?"

"Fantastic."

"Did Helene see it?" Carter persisted. "Where's Helene?"

"On the beach."

"I'll get my suit on," Maria said, uneasy in the darkened room, and BZ had looked at her again, then flicked the projector back on.

"It's too cold to swim," he said, and then to Carter: "The rough cut looked fantastic, except you're missing the story."

"Meaning what."

"Meaning," BZ said, "how did Maria feel about the gangbang, the twelve cocks, did she get the sense they're doing it not to her but to each other , does that interest her, you don't get that, you're missing the story."

The reel had run out and the only sound was the film slapping against the projector. "It's a commercial piece, BZ," Carter said finally.

BZ only shrugged, and changed the reel. Again the figures flooded the screen. Wordlessly, BZ sat on a pillow and began watching Maria. He rolled a cigarette and passed it to her, and when she passed it on to Carter he took it without looking away from the screen. Between the marijuana and the figures on the screen Maria felt flushed and not entirely in control.

"Look at the film, BZ," Carter had said suddenly. "Incredible, they've got opticals."

“I've seen the film, Carter," BZ had said, and never took his eyes from Maria.

"LET'S GO TO MEXICO CITY

tonight," BZ said.

“Who?"

“You, me, Helene, I don't know, maybe Larry Kulik, just fly down for a couple of days, Susannah Wood's there now doing some interiors at Churubusco."

"I don't want to do that," Maria said.

"Yes you do," BZ said.

EVERY NIGHT she named to herself what she must do: she must ask Les Goodwin to come keep her from peril. Calmed, she would f all asleep pretending that even then she lay with him in a house by the sea. The house was like none she had ever seen but she thought of it so often that she knew even where the linens were kept, the plates, knew how the wild grass ran down to the beach and where the rocks made tidal pools. Every morning in that house she would make the bed with fresh sheets. Every day in that house she would cook while Kate did her lessons. Kate would sit in a shaft of sunlight, her head bent over a pine table, and later when the tide ran out they would gather mussels together, Kate and Maria, and still later all three of them would sit down together at the big pine table and Maria would light a kerosene lamp and they would eat the mussels and drink a bottle of cold white wine and after a while it would be time to lie down again, on the clean white sheets. In the story Maria told herself at three or four in the morning there were only three people and none of them had histories, only the man and the woman and the child and, in the lamphght, the opalescent mussel shells.

But by dawn she was always back in the house in Beverly Hills, uneasy in the queer early light, plagued by her own and his own and Kate's own manifold histories, certain that BZ and Larry Kulik and all their kind recognized her in a way that Les Goodwin might not want to, recognized her, knew her, had her number, understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic. Instead of calling Les Goodwin she bought a silver vinyl dress, and tried to stop thinking about what had he done with the baby. The tissue. The living dead thing, whatever you called it.

"I'M GOING TO NEW YORK for a few days," she said to Carter. Going to New York had not before occurred to her but in the instant's confusion of running into Carter on the street in Beverly Hills the idea simultaneously materialized and assumed a real plausibility. It was something people did when they did not know what else to do, they went to New York for a few days. "Tomorrow morning," she added.